The book of the man who lives in a coconut

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‘Every artist is a Kickstarter’

Mr Coconut has been a bit quiet of late. Actually he hasn’t been that quiet – since we’ve been making the book with him we can hardly stop him from talking. But we’ve been a bit quiet with updates. That’s because I broke the website. Quite badly.

But I think it’s all fixed now (if a bit slow). And even though there haven’t been any updates, we have been getting on with making sample pages of the book, and finishing the video for Kickstarter. We’re hoping the Kickstarter page should be all ready to launch by the end of January (so long as I don’t break the website again).

But whilst we’re finishing it off, I thought I’d write a bit about why I like the idea of Kickstarter so much, and why this Mr Coconut project has been so much more fulfilling than other book projects that I’ve tried to get off the ground before. Mainly it’s because there has been no let up in enjoyment, in the pleasure of creating this thing, since the story was actually written. I’ve written other stories before, for both children and adults, and once they are finished, once I have felt like they are ready to be shown to other people, that’s where the fun ends. Then it’s on to sending them off to other people, to publishers, to agents – even sending them to enjoyable local literary nights where you might do a reading involves a lot of printing, and posting, but above all, waiting. Often waiting for nothing, sometimes just for that good old rejection letter.

So deciding to publish a book via Kickstarter is about seeing the project through yourself, until you have the finished artefact in your hand, rather than waiting for someone else, someone who has no real care for the work you’ve done, to make it for you. The process of working out how to make a book has been rewarding in itself – not to mention the fun of learning how to make a video for Kickstarter. Because it has been constantly enjoyable, I sometimes feel I don’t now even really care if we make the pledge total on Kickstarter that we need to publish the book (if not we’ll just make the book anyway and print as many or few copies as we might sell to people).

I was greatly inspired by a recent book, F**k the Radio, We’ve Got Apple Juice, in which the author Miranda Ward details the life of the band Little Fish, and how they went from supporting stadium rock bands in the US to leaving their label to make the music they wanted on their own. She talks of the idea of ‘sustainable creativity’ – that so long as you have the time and money to continue doing the work you love to do, that’s about all that matters. You live cheaply so you fulfilled by the work you love. She says that ‘every artist is a Kickstarter’ – meaning Kickstarter is the natural way for any artist to put their work out in the world, just so they have control of the whole process, just so they can continue to do the work they want to do. Never mind if it’s just for a few hours a week, with a shitty job to support it. If you have the work as your focus that’s a meaningful life.

And part of doing everything yourself is to pass on information to other people who might want to do the same. I’ve learnt much from other people’s blogs (particularly Austin Kleon and Christopher Shevlin on self-publishing), and want to do the same if it can be helpful to others. Hence writing protracted essays such as this…

If you’re doing everything yourself there is of course the matter of how you get people to know about your project, that balance between self-promotion and keeping the process enjoyable.. And marketing, promoting yourself is rarely enjoyable (the word makes my flesh crawl). (I’m not always sure that I know myself when I’m self-promoting on when I’m writing a blog post, like this one, because I want to write it.) Because the first people you tell are you friends, and whilst I want my friends to know what I’m doing, I certainly don’t want to badger them to buy what I’ve done. I’ll probably witter on about this more in a later post…

So just a few more weeks of finishing up the sample page of the book and the video. Then you can see them…